Dr. Gordon Stewart recently published a chapter on Central Asian history in Reinterpreting Exploration The West in the World Oxford University Press). “This important book critically re-evaluates what Western exploration was and did–its intellectual contours and its enduring consequences–and wonderfully illuminates exploration’s multiple histories, diverse geographies, and material forms. Regional essays on Russia, the Pacific, Eastern Africa, Central Asia, and Antarctica are paralleled by thematic attention to exploration and science, commerce, Enlightenment, print culture, and empire. Elegantly replacing unwarranted hagiography with critical historiography, national narratives with cross-cultural perspectives, the essays in Reinterpreting Exploration at once demythologize and reinvigorate debates on the West’s role in the world and the world’s impact upon the West.” –Charles W.J. Withers, University of Edinburgh